CENTER OF GOVERNMENT AND PRESIDENTIAL MEDIA STYLE IN THE BOLSONARO ERA
Government Center, Presidential Style, Jair Bolsonaro, Coordination of Public Policies.
The objective of this work is to construct and analyze the Government Center (GC) of President Jair Bolsonaro, his presidential style, classified by us as spectacular, in managing this structure and the government as a whole, and the coordination capacity of priority policies presented by his GC. In the literature review, we provide definitions and nomenclatures of what the GC would be, understood in this work as a set of units, formal or informal, that support the Head of the Executive (Cavalcante, 2018). We also present academic productions on the spectacular style and on GC and public policies. As a methodology, we apply the model presented by Cavalcante and Batista (2018) on the classification of the Government Center as structural or functional, de jure or de facto, and create two databases: one with all interactions recorded in the president's official agenda and another indicating, in the legislation that structures the Presidency of the Republic, the presence or absence of descriptors that can classify an organ in the Government Center. Additionally, we conducted interviews with three representatives who held high positions in the government to understand, in detail, the daily life of the GC and how the interviewees perceived Bolsonaro's leadership. We used the Iramuteq and R software for the analysis of the results. We dedicate a chapter to explain Bolsonaro's spectacular style based on Jones' definition (2018) and use data from 181 live broadcasts and a chronology of the most relevant events based on documentary research that allowed us to identify the spectacularization of certain themes and events. To analyze the coordination capabilities of the GC in public policies, we chose those mentioned by the interviewees and conducted a content analysis based on the interviews and bibliographic research: Covid-19 vaccination, Emergency Aid/Brazil Aid, and Digital Government. The results pointed to a present GC, but with very low leadership exercised by the President due to the high decentralization he promoted. Furthermore, the entry of the Centrão, in the second half of the government, allowed Bolsonaro to further distance himself from his own responsibilities to remain connected to his supporters and radicalize his discourse. In conclusion, although the coordinative capacity of the GC was impaired by the excessive decentralization of the president, less politicized policies achieved greater success by the GC member agencies.